I had received a few requests for updates. When I had created the page, I did not have the data for more than a week prior to when I created it, so I had not included the monthly, and half-yearly plots. Now, finally, I got off my lame posterior and updated it, with a minor improvement to how the graphs are presented in the form of a tabbed “menu” inside a tabbed “menu”.

This little gem is from the Debian Administration blog. The article deals with how to report a bug in Debian without a working MTA. However, with a little modification it can be useful for Ubuntu Users and bug triagers too.

reportbug is a nifty command that creates a template for reporting a package bug, which it then fills out with your comment and emails to the bugtrackers. It automatically adds info about your system and about the package that has the bug to your report.

Only, in Ubuntu, reportbug sends the email to the ubuntu-users mailing list. This is a known bug and has been around for a long time. The emails with the bug reports are bounced from the mailing list and then they end up in my inbox, where I sort through them, and then report the bug manually on behalf of the original reporter if the bug deserves attention, is not a duplicate etc. Needless to say, this is a minor pain :)

The next time you have a bug, find out the name of the package that has the bug (say “package-name”), and do the following:
1) Use the command reportbug --template -S normal package-name
2) Fill in an appropriate comment regarding what the bug itself is
3) File the bug after checking to see if it has already been reported.

The “–template” in the command will produce the template for the package, and the “-S normal” will set the severity of the bug to Normal.

Of course, you can report the bug via email too, but it currently requires that you have a gpg key on record at launchpad, so it might not work. Reporting via a web browser will work, a 100% of the time!

In a surprising development that seems really strange and unnecessary, Firefox 2.0 won’t go to the previous page when I press the “backspace” button on the keyboard. I have grown used to this over the period I have used Firefox. The fact that I can’t use backspace the way I am used to has been annoying me no end. So I decided to dig a little deeper.

But then, until the bug fix propagates to a firefox build available on Ubuntu, one has to resort to a little scratching to fix the matter. Here’s how you resurrect the backspace button in Firefox 2.0 (current as of this date):

Type “about:config” in the address bar of Firefox and press Enter.
`Filter` for ‘browser.backspace_action’ and change its value to 0 (zero).

I put together some scripts from Sam Tygier and some of my own to generate graphs of the number of open/unconfirmed/critical etc bugs from the statistics available on Launchpad. I figured I’d spend some time on doing this since visualizing past performance and statistics must act as motivators for at least some bug triagers :)

Here’s an example graph that shows the number of open bugs over the last 24 hours:

The page has links to the raw data if anyone needs it. As time goes by I will add a graph showing the changes over longer periods of time (like months).

Thanks are due to Sam for giving me the script he used to parse the data from the launchpad pages. I just added a simple enough gnuplot script to plot the graphs. Any suggestions/comments etc are welcome as comments to this post. The Ubuntu-in loco team was kind enough to lend me space on their server – thank you guys!

I figured out that this bug happens because on some machines (laptops) the keyboard key with the code “e02a” is for the hibernate key.

The most unobstrusive way to work around the problem might be to edit the /usr/share/hotkey-setup/generic.hk file and commenting out, or deleting the offending line that says:setkeycodes e02a 256
and then restarting the hotkey-setup service by doing a:$sudo /etc/init.d/hotkey-setup restart

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Ubuntu Linux Lover since January 10, 2005. Read the "About" page from the top tab for more info.